NOA Episode 9.4.1 ‘Trade Not Aid’: Ethical Capitalism and Rearticulation of African Development with Doris Okenwa

Host: Karyn Tan and Angela Zhou 

Podcast Guest: Doris Okenwa 

Karyn: Welcome to narratives of Asia. This episode is part of a collaboration between UCL Africa Conference and UCL Asiatic affairs, where students and professionals get around the table to connect and talk about Asia-Africa relations, specifically through the lens of China's influence and impact on Africa. In this collaboration, we seek to open constructive conversations on geopolitics and history that tie the two continents together.

Hello, everyone. I'm Karyn, a second-year European Social and Political Studies student, and I'll be your host for today. Joining me today is Angela, my co-host, who is also a second-year European Social and Political Studies student. 

Previously, we discussed the China-Africa relations review with the UCL Africa Conference team and it definitely piqued our interest to learn more about Africa's background, especially looking at investments and ground-up initiatives. We have a special guest joining us today for our podcast, Doris Okenwa. We know her as one of the staff at UCL’s Anthropology department but she has also done further areas of research. Doris, could you share with us more about your background and your research interests?

Doris: Hi, thank you for having me. Great to be talking to you guys and your work is very interesting. 

I'm Doris Okenwa and I got my PhD from the Department of Anthropology at LSE. My work was about natural resources in Africa with a case study on Kenya, on the recent oil discovery in Kenya. This was around 2012 when the discovery was done and so a couple of years after, I decided to follow up and see what was happening. I'm Nigerian and prior to my PhD I worked as a journalist for a number of years, almost 10 years, and I have first hand experience of the oil industry in Nigeria: the challenges, the political economy, social impacts, and all that. So when this new hydrocarbon boom started happening in East Africa, I thought it would be interesting to see what's new, what's changed, what are the lessons learned, how will corporations, how will national governments and communities do things differently or the same? And so Kenya was a perfect opportunity to explore that. 

The region where the oil was discovered in Turkana County, Northern Kenya, predominantly inhabited by pastoralists. It was interesting from an anthropological point of view to see what the interaction would be - pastoralism meets oil. Of course, there are different life worlds, there are different kinds of economic opportunities going on in Turkana, but pastoralism is still a mainstay. It's still the mainstay economy, mostly subsistence, and nomadic or transhuman, if you like. 

My thesis is entitled ‘impermanent development’ and what I found is that natural resource development in terms of oil, or the extractives industry more broadly, is impermanent. And it's a kind of false hope, if you like, because the narrative is often development, right? It's articulated around development, still, which is a big theme in Africa, or bigging up the political economy, and it's always a justification for large scale, infrastructural development, foreign investments, development aid, and all that. It's all about poverty alleviation, livelihood, economic diversification, and all that. But historically, oil has not worked. Now, I wouldn't go into the whole resource curse narrative, you know, which is a prominent theme in the oil discourse, right? I see, Angela, you're connecting with that. So it's the idea that resource rich countries have this curse. It's a resource curse where there is poverty and it's plenty, and examples are bound, and again, back to my own home country, Nigeria. But I take a broader and more nuanced view to that. I was keen to move away from that narrative and from victims and villains, if you like, and see what else is going on and how we can approach this differently. 

Development still is at the heart of this, creating jobs, creating opportunities. Oil has been discovered in this region that is one of the most marginalized in Kenya, and suddenly there was this crude awakening, into kind of what became the New Economic Zone, the new hub, with prospects and speculations about imagined futures. Where this resource, if it moves on to full production, will provide jobs, open up infrastructural development, and all that. In the same area, you also have renewable energy projects happening, wind power, solar, and all that. What I found is that it was a permanent and another key finding from my research was that the so-called ‘informal economy’, which we would or has often been considered impermanent, is actually the most stable. So the pastoralism sector is usually considered unstable, they move around a lot, but is actually quite sophisticatedly stable in its own way, even though there are weather challenges, and all that. 

And the small scale industries are actually all more stable but why did I come to that conclusion? In fact, it was concluded for me because the oil company pulled out, or said it had been challenged. It's a speculative game, isn't it? You know, it's all about prospecting, and at the end of the day, you find that the oil industry in itself is predicated on booms and busts so it is inherently impermanent, it's inherently unstable. So when you have corporate social responsibility projects, or local content, or development projects based around a sector that is in determinate, then that already flags a big question mark, you know. 

And so going forward, you might want to ask, so what then? So what do we do? I don't know. I'm an anthropologist, and you know, we're not very prescriptive, we're not good at making definitive recommendations, but one place to look at is to see how, and a lot of scholars have looked at this, to see how we can build sectors that are not dependent on the old economy, sectors that can that can stand alone. And let's not even look at just oil, even in infrastructure, you have this win-win narrative of roads and big infrastructure projects. In a book that I co-authored with a couple of other brilliant scholars on Land, Investments, and Politics in Eastern Africa, though we looked at East Africa, we also sort of came to the same conclusion that it wasn't quite clear who the beneficiaries of these investments are for. So that's just a bit about, you know, what I've done with my work.

Angela: Thank you for that. Thank you for joining us today Doris. So one of our starting questions was actually to ask a bit more about the book that you had just mentioned. I think you’ve given a really great overview of the background to your research, and specifically on the main themes of development in Africa. Just based on what you mentioned at the very, very beginning about infrastructure and development kind of promising things like false hope, how is this experienced by the people on the ground? 

Doris: So going to the theme of impermanence, the impermanent framework I tried to develop in my work, and that we also teased out in the co-edited volume, let's take infrastructure for example. I'd argue that infrastructure is not synonymous with economic growth but the assumption is that it is. The assumption is that there will be a trickle down effect. So if you build it, if you develop these big structures, whether it is railway or roads and all sorts of huge projects, or in the case of oil, develop the sector and see what other sub-sectors that would emerge from it - it doesn't always work. It's not synonymous because investors have a business plan. It is business right. So, big business is just that, it is business. Investment is business, it is not charity. Even though we have all these corporate social responsibility models attached to, say oil investment, for example, it is still a calculated risk, it is still done based on certain investment indices, you know. 

So, infrastructure is not always synonymous with growth, and if it was, then we would have seen an exponential growth where the numbers actually add up because the numbers often do not add up. And then again, infrastructure, it is a capital intensive development on the one hand, hence the foreign investments and partnerships, but on the other hand, I think that it's form of maximization also depends on income levels and capital assets. If you create the structures where people do not have the capacity to access them, then it becomes a problem. In essence, maybe investments and infrastructure must go hand in hand with providing capital support for those it is supposedly intended for, which is where we have the problem between winners and losers, right, who the beneficiaries are. So say you have, in the case of my fieldwork for example, or in the work that we've done, you have projects, for example, or jobs, jobs in itself is the kind of development that people can access. The people that have capital, whether it's social capital, educational capital, or financial capital to access these things, so it creates some sort of inequality.The benefits sometimes are embedded with certain kinds of inequalities. And then you also have arguments about elite capture, you know, elite capture accountability and all that - who is able to manage and monitor these things? 

And the inequalities that emerge, it's also very spatial. So in all development, for example, you have developments around the particular areas where the oil is. This narrative of host communities, right, so say my fieldwork, Turkana is the host community, but then Turkana is huge and the oil development is basically happening around the eastern region. And even within that eastern region, there are particular places where the oil fields are. So what then happens to the other regions? It's not as straightforward as it is, that's the point. You would always have winners and losers in these things and based on the capacity people have to access it. So these are some of the challenges. And then again, broad projects do not often have trickle down effects and what kinds of projects are these, oftentimes they are top-down, some have called it White Elephants.

The narrative of participation and inclusion is old. It's a tale as old as time in development processes of any kind, whether extractives or otherwise, but it's vital. It is vital, it's inescapable, as cliche as participation might sound, because a lot of these ideas, a lot of these benefits, are top-down. How it actually works, what people actually do, and how it infiltrates or impacts people's lives on a day to day basis in the actual sense of the word, the number, they're a bit ambiguous, in that sense. 

Karyn: Speaking about the winners and losers that you mentioned, it reminds us a lot about the stakeholders that are often involved in these projects. So I wanted to start with, like between the citizens themselves, could you tell us more about how investments could affect the relationships between the communities on the ground? And whether there are instances of, for example, or a rush for land and resources as well?

Doris: Oh, yes, totally. Um, yes, there's been a rush for land in Africa, a renewed rush for land and resources in Africa in the last decade, but it also comes down to the framing of these investments, and different kinds of framings. How governments frame these investments as, again, the win-win for all, and the idea of resources in waiting, often seen happening in communities that have been erstwhile marginalized, but then oftentimes, you find that it clashes with local framings of what resources are. 

So in Turkana, for example, where I conducted my fieldwork, land is valuable. It's not empty. You might go there and it's not 77 square kilometre hectares of land, it's a lot and it's dry. One way of seeing would be this as a vast resource waiting, and even better still, oil has been discovered but the land where that oil was discovered, could be, as in the case of Turkana in some parts, very viable grazing land for the pastoralists. If you frame investments and benefits based on what is underneath the land, are you saying that it was invaluable before then? Meanwhile, the locals that use that land for livestock grazing have another kind of livelihood meaning for land or cultural connections and what have you. Land is never just empty and the meaning of resources differ across the board and that's where some of the tensions come from. And even within the communities, of course, you have people that will say: yeah why not, we have all this land, build things on it. 

Another thing I found is that there is an emphasis on filling up space, if you like, as I describe it, you know, building up the environment. Again, this idea of land-in-waiting and resource-in-waiting, you know, so build it up. And you have a sector of the community that agree, let's build roads, let's build infrastructure, let's develop. And development in that sense is very construction-based, very concrete based, very permanent based. Again, going back to the title of my work in permanent development, and the pursuit of permanence, you know, permanent livelihoods, but also permanent structures, right? If you even look at the, shall we say, traditional houses in Turkana that, for some people, it connotes the idea of underdevelopment, you know, these are very temporary structures that are very convenient for pastoralists. So you also have this rush of building up the environment and in filling up the space as a marker of development, but what exactly that infrastructure does, that development does, you know, the stability of the duration of the jobs, the impact of the buildings and the infrastructure, that is the more ambiguous parts. They then have a development effect where you have the aesthetics happening but the numbers in terms of impact are a bit more ambiguous.

Angela: Yes, the impacts are ambiguous, but when you go onto the flip side and look at the aims and the starting point of these developments, you mentioned how the government framed these resources and development as valuable for the land, how is this received by the people and the communities? For example, for the pastoralists, for investment and development to be introduced into their communities, how is this received by them? And again, running off the whole theme about permanency and permanency being one of the aims of development, a movement towards ‘keeping capital where it is and doing good’, how has this been received by the people? Is it welcomed? You mentioned there being tensions, how is this resolved amongst the people or between the people and the state? 

Doris: There are different sides to it, of course. So let's talk about evidence, which is a big part of the new wave of ethical capitalism, right. So if you look at the motivation for me, even going down this road, it was to see what's different. I come from a country where oil has a very, very problematic history, and you have these new oil developments and discoveries happening elsewhere - so what's new, what has changed. Oil and its discovery was happening in Kenya in an era of ethical capitalism, ethical extraction. And the same thing goes again for other forms of developments. Like we did in our book, whether it's Ethiopia or other parts of Eastern Africa, this rush for land and resources happening again, it's coming at a time of ethical capitalism where corporations have a mandate, it's not part of their remit. You might call it Corporate Social Responsibility or social investments, it's a remit to leave the communities better, so to change the story. So it's not legally binding but it is a requirement, right? So even for some corporations to access funding, they have to build this component into their business plan and if we go back to what I said earlier, it is business. 

Moving from evidence, it also takes us to bringing corporations into development, right? It becomes very murky. What is the role of government? What is the role of corporations? Are corporations now doing development? Are corporations building schools? Or should it be the government? And where is the state? So you then have this neoliberal emergence of development and then moving the narrative towards ‘trade not aid’, which is where China features largely, you know, moving away from hunters and moving away from the classic boreholes and education, building dispensaries, hospitals, and all that, but you know, let it be a trade partnership, let it be something more concrete than the classic, you know. 

On the one hand, you have the demand for evidence, which again, I theorize as permanence. What can we point to that you as an organization, you as a corporation, has done here? And recall that the problematic history of developments in general in Africa is that it doesn't quite stay, right. This borehole that works today doesn't necessarily work tomorrow. So much money has gone into aid, it goes in corruption, it goes here, it goes there. Whether it's an organization or a corporation, what is the evidence? Long term, long-lasting evidence - what can we point to that shows, yes, you have left these communities behind. So as you are extracting, you are also leaving something behind. 

And yes, even though the narrative has been moving for a long time now towards ‘aid not trade’, the benefits are still couched in the same, it's still articulated in the same way, under that development headline. You find out what corporations are doing is still within the development loophole. It’s almost as if corporations have become the new NGOs. Even if you're mobilizing communities, the so-called capacity building, community rights, participation and all, there are still a lot of communities that articulate the benefits they want, or their expectations, in terms of development. And that then limits the scope of what can actually be done because we still come back to the question of, what can we point to? And then you have signposts all over the place. The oil companies name brandishing the school, they have built the roads, they have built the water pumps and all. As part of a more long term, permanent benefit, you have a lot of focus of interest in entrepreneurship; raising new liberal citizens, small scale investments, small and medium enterprises, businesses, education and all that. 

Unfortunately, it's still dependent on the sector. When the oil company closes down, what then happens afterwards? Because this is a business module and the oil company is not going to keep on doing development when they've left or when the business is no longer viable. If there is a boom, just the way you have booms and busts in the oil market more broadly, you also have booms and busts of development. So when the oil company is down, when it is no longer viable, they move on. So what then happens to all the sectors and businesses that have a reason? You have this boom of jobs and small businesses and all, and afterwards, it becomes you know, problematic. But then that doesn't mean that there hasn't, you know, been benefits. People will tell you upfront in Turkana that there have been some tangible impacts in terms of infrastructure development, specifically some roads, but most of the roads are roads that lead to the oil wells. Pastoralists, some of them have gotten jobs, you know, security jobs and all. Some have received some money and restocked their herd and all, but land still remains very contentious. 

I'll give you a more concrete example. What was happening in terms of benefits was, at the start, the oil company would meet with people, meet with different villages around the oil well and tell them what they want to do, and negotiate some kind of benefits. So for an oil well, for example, there might be some building schools, attaching dormitories, some building water projects, and all. But much later, people started demanding more and you have some activists that are part of the community, they're like, no, this doesn't quite add up, and so some monetary benefit was attached. But then the question is, how did you come to that? You know, because it's not the villagers that fixed that amount. So if we say, 7 million Kenyan shillings, you know, it's about 70,000 US dollars, I think, how did you come to that? Who is setting the tone, who is in charge? And then within the community, of course, you would have tensions of how it will be spent, who is in charge, and all? And of course, it's inevitable, because, I mean, social life doesn't come without contentions. 

These are some of the problems where ethics in itself is good, but then ethics somehow limits itself because of its narrative, the need for evidence, the need for permanence. It then begins to look as if it's perfunctory. At the end of the day, we need to call it what it is. This is a business model, it's a business choice. The calculation to build that well, to give that money, to develop entrepreneurs and all that. It’s not the company's job, it is part of their business module. So we have to really question responsibility here, across the board. Not just corporate social responsibility but other forms of responsibility; of the community leaders themselves, their county leaders and national governments. We’ve seen a situation which a lot of scholars have talked about, corporate social responsibility or community dimensions of the oil industry, or infrastructure, big developments and all that, have all touched upon - are we leaving communities to their own devices and moving responsibility to another to another domain? Because whose job is it? Whose job is it to do these things? 

I recall a meeting I attended in Nairobi between some government officials and various oil companies working in the country and the government official was saying, you have to make sure that those marginalized people in these communities benefit. But then I asked, whose responsibility is it? First of all, who marginalizes them in the first place? What are the social and economic and political structures that left some areas marginalized for years, as in the case of Turkana, as in the case of a lot of other places where there are big investments and where booms are happening. And then whose responsibility is it to make it okay, because the company wouldn't stay there forever, and in some cases, if they do, you have the inequalities that come with that; the extraction as it were, without leaving anything behind. Beyond the perfunctory structures, you can point to and say, this is what development is. So it's about rethinking what we categorize as development. We're still sort of stuck in that loop of development being articulated around particular things, you know.